The ‘eminently predictable’ attempt to kill Donald Trump

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When a 20-year-old man shot and nearly killed Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Americans by and large were shocked but not necessarily surprised.

What motivated Thomas Crooks to clamber atop a roof with a high-powered rifle and attempt to assassinate the former president remains a subject of police investigation. Yet the wider atmosphere in which Crooks acted has become dreadfully familiar.

It is one in which partisans wage increasingly bitter rhetorical combat, perceiving the other side to be less than human and the stakes to be existential. It rages on social media, across a new generation of media outlets and even at local school board and town hall meetings where the stakes would typically seem to be less than life-or-death.

One of the few traces of common ground that remains in a polarised nation is the sense that each new low will be followed by something worse, and that violence is the eventual endpoint.

“The curious aspect of our times is that we seem to be imploding when nothing would precipitate this degree of crisis,” said Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School…

Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, described the US as “an agitated, irritated country right now” and warned of worse to come. He was backed by a Marist poll, published in April, which found that one in five Americans believed violence might be necessary to put the nation back on track.

As they contemplated the unthinkable — what would have happened if Trump had been killed — political leaders appealed for calm on Sunday. “This is a moment where all of us have a responsibility to take down the temperature,” said Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, a vital swing state. He was echoed hours later by President Joe Biden in an address from the Oval Office.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, ordered its staff to refrain from commenting on social media about Saturday’s shooting to avoid worsening the situation

For many critics of Trump, this era of rhetorical violence was ushered in by him, when he descended an escalator at his Manhattan tower nearly a decade ago and formally joined the political arena. He kicked off his campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and then, infamously, declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” after a torch-bearing, rightwing mob shouting antisemitic slurs marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

…many Trump supporters remain convinced that the left could never accept Trump’s victory in 2016 and so set about trying to delegitimise him, including by caricaturing him as a monster and would-be dictator. That has not made Maga supporters receptive to Biden’s appeals for comity.

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